Why Not Educate the Professors?

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Single Tax Review, Vol. XIX, No.1, January-February 1919]

Prof. Irving Fisher, of Yale University is reported to have made some interesting statements last month before the American Economic Association:

"An urgent need in my opinion, is some machinery for diffusing economic principles among the masses of our population. The common people, whose ideas will, more and more, rule the world, are in crying need of competent instruction in economics."

Apparently not satisfied with the present educational institutions, newspapers, popular journals and such extensive advertising campaigns as preached to the people from every wall and fence and even wrote its maxims over the landscape, Prof. Fisher proposes a new and more expensive machine:

"Expensive research, he says, far beyond the reach of the professor's purse, is necessary if the economist is to be of any important public service in studying wealth distribution, the profit system, the problem of labor unrest and the many other pressing practical problems."

The coming rule of the common people is making some other people nervous.

The solicitude of Prof. Fisher for the economic education of these coming rulers is almost pathetic. The situation is, indeed, embarrassing; for the would-be educators have to acknowledge that, before they can be "of any important public service," they themselves must be educated!

Before the "expensive research" rather ingenuously asked for by Prof. Fisher is authorized, might it not fairly be asked of the Economic Faculties of the country, upon which vast sums have already been spent, that they first come to an agreement themselves as to fundamental, primary economics, -- such as the economic relation of man to the earth, the cause and character of rent, the natural measure of wages, interest, profits and rent? To elucidate these issues calls for no great expenditure for technical equipment and research, but simply and solely the application of undistorted human reason to the every-day facts of our environment. And until these elemental, basic issues have been definitely settled, economics has no assured foundation upon which any people, common or uncommon, can build.

And yet, upon these simple basic issues, all that the nation gets from its economic teachers is an anarchy of opinion and a confused babel of voices. The common people could do no worse.